The
Catholic Church holds that faith in Jesus Christ is not saving faith unless it
bears fruit in good works. Vice-versa, the Church holds that such works are so
intimately joined to faith, that, without them, it is impossible for the
believer to grow or persevere in his faith.(1) In this way, good works are
necessary for salvation.

Most Protestants are uncomfortable with such a statement. Without denying the
importance of good works, Protestants tend to see them as symptoms of the one
thing necessary rather than as necessities in their own right. For Luther, good
works were merely symptoms of confident faith; for Calvin, they were symptoms of
irresistible grace. Few Protestants today are familiar with the details of
Luther's or Calvin's personal thought; what they have inherited from these great
forebearers is rather a general orientation, whose core is the conviction that
according to St. Paul, we are justified <sola fide> (by faith alone) or
<sola gratia> (by grace alone), either formula being understood to exclude
any essential role of good works.

Now, in order to see how this general orientation may clash with Catholicism,
it is necessary to introduce two further points.

First, Catholic and Protestant views on the respective roles of grace, faith
and works cannot be compared meaningfully, unless one specifies what stage of
the justificational process one is talking about. In the preparatory stage, for
instance, in which prevenient graces first stir a person towards an interest in
religious truth, towards repentance, and towards faith, Catholics, Lutherans and
Calvinists are at one in saying "<sola gratia>."(2) A second
stage is the very transition from death to life, which is the first stage of
justification proper. Here the parties are at one in saying "sola
fide," though they seem to mean different things by it. Protestants tend to
mean that, at this stage, by the grace of God, man's act of faith is the sole
act required of him; Catholics mean that faith is the beginning, foundation and
root of all justification, since only faith makes possible the acts of hope and
charity (i.e. love-for-God) which are also required.(3) However, since most
Protestants have a broad notion of the act of faith, whereby it includes
elements of hope and love, it is often hard to tell how far the difference on
this point is real and how far it is a matter of words. Finally, however, there
comes a third stage, that of actual Christian life, with its problems of growth
and perseverance. The man justified by faith is called to "walk" with
God, to progress in holiness. It is at this stage that the parties sharply
diverge. Catholics affirm, and Protestants strenuously deny, that the born-again
Christian's good works merit for him the increase of grace and of the Christian
virtues. As a result, Protestant piety has no obvious place for the
self-sacrifices, fasts, and states of perfection which are prominent features of
Catholic piety.

Now this divergence over works in the third stage is partially due to a
Protestant allergy to the word 'merit', but only partially. The real reasons are
much deeper, which brings me to my second point.

At each stage, neither the apparent agreements nor the apparent disagreements
can be understood without looking at certain metaphysical quarrels, the chief of
which is over the very existence of what Catholics call "grace."

In the natural order, a doctor ministers to a moribund patient and restores
him to life; he does so by really changing the condition of the patient's body;
he restores to it a quality called health. Can something analogous happen in the
supernatural order? If so, what Catholics call "grace" exists. It is
the quality thanks to which the soul is made alive and enabled to function as
God intended it to function, just as health is such a quality to the body.

Of course, as is the case with all analogies, there are points at which this
one breaks down. The human doctor is a finite physician; he can heal the sick
but not the dead; God, on the other hand, restores spiritual health to those
dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:5), so that God's act is not so much a
cure of the sick as it is a down-payment on the Resurrection (Ephesians 2:6). So
the analogy limps. It fails to reflect the fact that grace is not only like
health but also like brand-new life. Still, between life and health there is a
deep connection, so that this limp is not fatal to the analogy. However, there
is another problem with it.

Thanks to his instruments, chemical and surgical, the doctor is the principal
cause of the patient's restored health; but it would seem odd to say that the
man's health is wholly the doctor's gift, even if the doctor collected no fee.
After all, it is the patient's own natural powers, his own natural capacity for
health, which allows the doctor's work to be successful. So there is a
cooperation here between the doctor's art and the patient's nature, thanks to
which the restored health is not wholly the doctor's gift but partially also the
patient's own achievement. Such things cannot be said of the initial, justifying
grace. As Catholics understand it, this grace is a quality for which man has no
natural capacity, to which he has no natural right, and towards which he has no
natural inclination. It is a pure surprise, a pure gift, an elevation of our
nature rather than a part of it; and this was true even before the Fall.(4) Now,
to be sure, Catholics believe that once we have been elevated to grace, we
become capable of cooperating with God's further graces, since He has now given
us the capacity and the inclination for such things. But this does not cancel
the original picture; it only means that our very capacity to cooperate is a
gift to us, something not natively ours; as a result, every God-pleasing act of
ours remains so rooted in God's initial gift that it is simply an actuation of
that gift. So the analogy between health and grace limps in this second way: it
fails to reflect the fact that grace is so totally a gift that it exceeds our
natural capacities and hence never becomes simply "our property," even
after it has been given.

Thanks to these difficulties, what Catholics call "sanctifying
grace" or "habitual grace" turns out to be a deeply mysterious
entity: a quality of man which is a property of God. In order to cope with such
an entity, one needs a sophisticated metaphysics of participation. The Church
Fathers and their successors, the Scholastic Doctors, took the trouble to work
out such a metaphysics because the existence of grace as a real entity in man—ontic
grace—was and is the foundation, without which the whole Catholic
understanding of justification makes no sense.

The Protestant Reformers, however, impatient with metaphysics, preferred not
to cope with such an entity and denied its existence.(5) To them it seemed
simpler to say that grace is something wholly in God, namely, His favor towards
us. But then, if grace is not something real in man, our
"justification" can no longer be conceived as a real change in us; it
will have to become a sheer declaration on God's part, e.g. a declaration that,
thanks to the work of Christ, He will henceforth consider us as just, even
though we remain inwardly the sinners we always were. Hence, the Protestant
doctrine of "forensic" or "extrinsic" justification. Now
watch what happens to our own act of faith: it ceases to be the foundational act
of an interior renewal and becomes a mere requirement, devoid of any salvific
power in its own right, which God arbitrarily sets as the condition on which He
will declare us just. Whereupon, watch what happens to our good works: they
cease to be the vital acts wherein an ontologically real "new life"
consists and manifests itself; they become mere human responses to divine mercy—nice,
but totally irrelevant to our justification—or else they become zombie-like
motions produced in us by irresistible divine impulses, whereby God exhibits His
glory in His elect.

Now, again, few Protestants have thought these matters through. Most do not
realize that the theology they have inherited derives historically from
nominalistic assumptions, which led Luther and Calvin to deny the existence of
sanctifying grace. Rather, they feel that they are simply reading St. Paul.
"By grace are ye saved, through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is
the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8f).
They feel that an extrinsic, purely declaratory justification is the obvious
meaning of such passages. Catholic apologetics, therefore, must show the
opposite. It is no use arguing metaphysics until we break down that lively
conviction by which the Protestant feels that St. Paul is his home turf. We must
show that St. Paul's real position is far closer to that of Trent than to that
of Luther.

Here, then is apologetics at work in a different way—the way of exact and
objective exegesis.(6)

The place to begin is with the fact that St. Paul expounds and contrasts two
economies of justification or two orders of righteousness. Thus, Philippians 3:9
says: "(I counted all things loss) that I might be found in Him, not having
my own justice, which is from the Law, but the justice which is from the faith
of Jesus Christ, the justice that comes from God through faith." Here the
main contrast is between justice from the Law and justice <from faith>,
whereupon a second contrast emerges between <my own> justice and justice
<from> God.

This second contrast reappears in Romans 10:3, "(The Jews) not knowing
the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not submit to
God's justice."

We learn the result of this Jewish conduct in Romans 9:30-32, "What
shall we say then? The gentiles, who were not pursuing justice, laid hold of
justice, but the justice which is from faith. Israel, however, pursuing the law
of justice, did not attain the law" (i.e. did not accomplish or fulfill
it). The exact interpretation of this text has been debated,(7) but for our
purposes it suffices to see that Paul was speaking of a justice pursued by way
of works and that such justice was the great ambition of the Jews in connection
with the Law of Moses.

The point that Mosaic legal justice was a matter of works reappears in Romans
10:5 ("Moses wrote of the justice which is from the law that the man who
keeps it shall live by it," quoting from Leviticus 18:5) in contrast with
the justice from faith. The same is said in Galatians 3:12 ("But the law is
not from faith; rather the one who does those things will live in them")
and in Romans 2:13 ("It is not the hearers of the Law who have been
justified before God but the doers of the Law will be justified," i.e. will
be declared just at the last judgment), and this is expounded at length in
Romans 2: 23-27: "You who glory in the Law, you dishonor God by
transgression of the Law....To be sure, circumcision is profitable if you
observe the Law; but if you transgress the Law, you are returned to a state of
uncircumcision. So, if the uncircumcised man keeps the just precepts of the Law,
shouldn't he be regarded as circumcised? In fact, the man who remains in his
natural state of uncircumcision and who has accomplished the Law will judge you,
who with letter and circumcision have broken the Law."

So, over against the justice of God, which is the justice of faith, there is
a self-justice which is of the Law and which is a justice of works. This latter
would give men a basis for boasting (Romans 4:2, Ephesians 2:8-9), since works
give one a strict right to be considered just: "To the man who has works,
his salary is not counted as a favor but as something due," (Romans 4:4).

Now, as a matter of practical fact, does anyone really have this self-justice
of Law and works? Over and over again Paul answers in the negative: "for
from the works of the Law no flesh is justified before Him" (Romans 3:20);
"Israel, pursuing a law of justice, did not attain to the Law; why? because
Israel did not seek to attain it through faith but through works" (Romans
9:31-32); "For all who proceed by the works of the Law are under the curse;
for it is written, 'Cursed be anyone who does not persevere in practicing all
that is written in the Book of the Law'"(Galatians 3:10, quoting
Deuteronomy 27: 26 and the context indicates that the curse has indeed gone into
effect).

How does St. Paul back up this startling thesis? How does he explain the
failure of anyone to be justified before God by the works of the Law? Here are
the steps of his answer.

1. "For through the law comes knowledge of sin" (Romans 3:20). The
law makes sin better known. What else?

2. "The law works (God's) wrath. For where there is no law, there is no
transgression" (Romans 4:15), meaning, of course, no transgression of
positive law.

3. Such transgression is deadly. "For while we were in the flesh, the
passions of sins, which were through the law, worked in our members so as to
bring forth death" (Romans 7:5). The passions or causes of sins were
stirred up by the law. "While we were in the flesh" describes the
situation of Christians before their baptism. So the law is clearly being given
some part of the responsibility for the existence or activity of the passions
which lead to various sins. What is this responsibility?

4. The answer is given in Romans 7:7-25, a text which falls into two parts,
verses 7-12 and 13-25. Here is the first part. "What shall we say? Is the
law sin? Far from it! But I would not have known sin except through the law. For
indeed I would not have known covetousness, if the law had not said, 'Thou shalt
not covet.' But sin, taking occasion of the commandment, produced in me all
covetousness; for without law sin is dead. So long as there is no law, I was
alive; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died, and the
commandment which was for the sake of life turned out to be for death. For sin,
taking occasion of the commandment, seduced me and, through it, killed me. So
then the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, just and good."

There is a human story here, but whose story is it? St. Paul's "me"
is certainly not meant to refer exclusively to himself. Some interpreters have
thought he meant the young Jew in general and then, perhaps, by analogy, any
young person. For just as the young Jew gains awareness of sin through learning
the revealed Law, so also the young Gentile learns sin through the emergence of
his conscience at the age of reason. On this interpretation, the time when I was
alive without the law was the time of my non-responsible childhood. Thus Origen
and St. Jerome.(8) Other interpreters have thought that Paul's "me" is
the subject of human history. Man knew sin before Moses but not with the same
killing exactitude. It is one thing to have nature or conscience as one's
accuser and quite another to have God Himself. Hence the time when I was alive
without the Law was the time before Moses. Thus Chrysostom(9) and Aquinas(10).
Still others have thought that Paul was speaking of universal human experience
as prototyped in Adam. Our first parent "lived" until God gave him a
commandment, of which sin was able to take advantage. Thus Theodore of Mopsuestia.(11)

It may be the case that St. Paul had something of each of these possibilities
in mind. Only Adam and Eve were fully innocent before they learned God's
positive law. But each of us is somewhat like Adam in this: whenever we become
fully aware of a divine commandment, the experience marks a crucial transition
both (a) from whatever vague sense of unease we may have felt beforehand to the
conscious guilt we must feel afterward, and (b) from the lesser malice of just
"doing as we please" to the infinitely greater malice of pleasing
ourselves in defiance of God. And this experience of transition which each of us
has (perhaps in one way upon reaching the age of reason, and in other ways later
in life) in turn parallels the collective experience of our race in history, as
the "age of ignorance" yielded to the epoch of Sinai.

In any case, we are now ready for the second part of this text (Romans
7:13-25), which clearly depicts the state of life under the Law of Moses.
"Did what is good then become death for me? Far from it! But sin, in order
to appear as sin, gave me death by means of a good thing, so that sin might be
held the more guilty through the fact of the commandment. For we know that the
law is spiritual; but I am corporeal [Paul's word here is not his usual <sarkikos,>
which means dominated by the flesh, but <sarkinos,> which means made of
the flesh.], sold into the service of sin. I do not understand what I do. For
what I should like to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do. So if I do what I
don't want to, I recognize that the law is good. But then it is no longer I who
do it but the sin which dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. In effect, the
desire for good is within my power but not the practice of it....For in my inner
self I take pleasure in the Law of God, but I perceive another law in my
members, which struggles against the law of my reason, and which enslaves me to
the law of sin which is in my members....Thus it is one and the same me who
serve the Law of God through my reason but the law of sin through my
flesh."

Here the "me" is no longer considered in its state of relative
innocence. Sin has emerged, and an inner conflict is unfolding under the most
unfavorable conditions. Sin is no longer an agent external to man, as in the
case of innocent Adam, nor an interior but latent principle, as in the case of a
small child. Sin has become a "law" of the flesh.(12) Given this new
power of sin, there emerges a new "me," whom Paul says has fallen into
the power of sin.

Nearly every ancient commentator, plus a virtual unanimity of modern
exegetes, Catholic and Protestant alike, has understood this new "me"
to be the Jew existing under the Mosaic Law. What makes this exegesis inevitable
is the fact that Paul, in the verses which follow immediately, makes this sorry
state of inner defeat, this impotency of one's better self, a foil for the
totally different experience now available in Christ. Through Him we are able to
behave "not as our corporeal nature dictates but as the spirit
dictates" (Romans 8:4).

Such was also St. Augustine's exegesis, until, at the end of his life and in
further reaction to Pelagianism, he changed his mind and extended the
"me" of Romans 7 to the Christian.(13) (St. Augustine's example on
this point was followed by St. Gregory the Great, Peter Lombard, and Thomas
Aquinas.) Needless to say, Luther, Melanchthon, and the Calvinists were
delighted to adopt such an idea. To this day, the sad doctrine that our
justification must be something merely declaratory has one of its most powerful
roots in this fateful mistake: what St. Paul considered the paradigm experience
of the Jew under the Law is confused with the paradigm experience of the
Christian under the power of grave! And it is interesting to note that the
revivalist wing of Protestantism tends to escape this mistake. Encountering
Christ in deep experiences of conversion, they taste the power of His victory
over sin in their own lives; having tasted it, they have not a doubt in the
world that they have been changed inwardly, that God has given them new hearts,
and that the nightmare experience of Romans 7 is over for them. Of course, the
Christian can fall back into that nightmare. This is the grain of truth in St.
Augustine's later exegesis. The Christian can cease to live in the power of
Christ; he can neglect prayer, grow cold, and find himself thrown back on his
own resources; when he does so, inevitably, he will repeat within himself the
experience of the Jew under the Law. For St. Paul's essential point is valid
under either covenant: the moral information of the commandment, no matter how
sublime, is powerless of itself to secure our practice of the good. Being
nothing of itself but an external norm and not an active force, the Law boxes
the unconverted or half-converted human heart into an unbearable situation, from
which there is no escape but a new and totally different kind of law: "the
law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:2). To this latter St.
Augustine also gave full weight elsewhere in his theology, and in that regard
the Reformers did not follow him.

In summary, then, what was wrong with the Jewish project to achieve
righteousness from the Law is this: the project prescinded from God's grace.
Taken in abstraction from grace, the Law was powerless; destined to be disobeyed
at least inwardly,(14) the Law served to provoke and deepen sin.

Though it may seem odd to summarize our discussion in that way, introducing
suddenly the mention of grace, there is a reason for doing so. Romans 7, with
its abstract dialectic of Law and sin, better self and concupiscence, has to be
understood consistently with what St. Paul has already said in Romans 2. There
he seems to treat the keeping of the commandments as a real possibility:
"for when the gentiles, who do not have the Law, naturally do the things of
the Law..."(Romans 2:14). In fact, he says, "God will render to each
man according to his works: eternal life to those who, dedicating themselves
with perseverance to good works, seek glory, honor and immortality...glory honor
and peace to all who do good, to the Jew first and to the Greek" (Romans
2:7) and this in a context in which the revelation of Christ is not even under
discussion yet.

These words certainly show that St. Paul did not regard good works as
impossible, misguided, or pernicious, as some Protestant exegetes have tried to
hold. Quite the contrary. But if St. Paul seems to admit justifying works in
Romans 2 and to exclude them in Romans 7, the most plausible explanation is that
he is speaking of the total human condition in chapter 2, where grace is at work
among Jew and gentile alike, whereas in chapter 7 he is showing what happens
when the Law is isolated from grace. Such isolation is exactly what is sought,
when man seeks his own righteousness on the basis of law.

Moreover, what we have been saying squares with St. Paul's remarks on the
function of the Law in God's overall plan of salvation. "The Law intervened
so that sin might abound" (Romans 5:20), that is, so that men might become
more convinced of their sins and learn humility from their moral failures. For
such humility would dispose them toward the ultimate end of the Law: "for
the end of the Law is Christ" (Romans 10:4). As Paul explains: "Before
faith came, we were placed under the guardianship of the Law, sealed up in
expectation of the faith which was to be revealed. Thus the Law was our teacher
until Christ" (Galatians 3:23f).

St. Paul's conviction that God intended the Law to be provisional has its
roots in the earliest preaching of the Church. Stunned by the death and
resurrection of Jesus, whom they had thought to be the Messiah, the first
disciples were compelled to search the Scriptures for a clue to the meaning of
these shattering events. By combining Psalm 18 (alluded to in Acts 2:23) with
Psalms 16 and 110, Peter and the others were able to see that death and
resurrection had been part of the script, so to speak, for the Messiah. God had
all along intended that His Christ should suffer (Acts 2:23; 3:18) and that he
should not receive his sovereignty on earth but in Heaven, after a resurrection
(compare Acts 2:25-35 with the vision of the Son of Man in heaven in Daniel 7).
These points had to be preached, because otherwise the Jews could not be
persuaded that the facts about Jesus, however true, "filled the bill"
of messianic prophecy. But merely to preach these points of correspondence was
not enough. The question remained, why? Why should the Messiah have to go
through all that! It made no sense, given Judaism's picture of what was wrong
with the world. According to that picture, what was wrong was Israel's failure
to enjoy the exaltation among the nations which was her due as God's people.
What needed fixing was the geo-political situation. For once the Messiah had
made Zion the visible center of divine and human power, the nations would flow
up to her, forsaking their idols, and the blessing of the knowledge of the Law
would flow out to all people. But if the Messiah was supposed to suffer and die,
mankind's religious problem had to be quite different from what the Jewish
picture contemplated. What was needed was a clue to a whole new picture. This
clue was found in the Servant Songs of Isaiah (especially Isaiah 52:13 -53:12),
where the suffering and death of the Servant are presented as a vicarious
atonement for sin. "By his suffering shall my servant justify many, taking
their faults upon himself" (Isaiah 53:11). If the servant and the Messiah
were one and the same figure, that would explain everything, including certain
dark sayings of Jesus (Mark 10:45; 14:24). But it would also explode the Jewish
world-view. If the Messiah's central mission was to deal with sin, then the
problem to which the Messiah was the answer went back beyond the Davidic
Monarchy and even beyond Moses; it went clear back to Adam. And if mankind's
central religious problem was not ignorance of the Law but bondage to sin, then
faith in the Redeemer-from-sin would have to be the guiding thread of God's plan
for man, from the beginning. Was it not written: "The just man shall live
by faith" (Habakuk 2:4)?

This is the thought that led Paul to Abraham, the man whose faith was
reckoned to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:1-11; Galatians
3:15ff). At the very origin of Israel, Paul found in Abraham's faith the thread
resumed in Christ; whereupon the entire Mosaic sub-plot could be read as a
parenthesis ordained to Christ.

The Jewish project to seek one's own justice from the Law, then, was not only
psychologically impossible (Romans 7) but also contrary to the plan of the ages,
in which the Law had no function but this: in leading us to Christ, to render
itself obsolete. Now we can understand why Paul cried out in frustration at the
obtuse Galatians: "If the Law can justify us, there is no point in the
death of Christ" (Galatians 2:21).

And the time has come to examine that other kind of justice mentioned by
Paul: the justice which comes from God through faith.

"For in it (the Gospel) the justice of God is revealed from faith to
faith, as it is written, 'The just shall live from faith"' (Romans 1:17).
What is this justice "of God" (dikaiosune theou)? If the genitive is
one of attribution, then what has been revealed is God's own attribute rather
than something He gives to men. Thus Origen(15) and Pseudo-Ambrose.(16) But if
the genitive is one of source, then what is revealed is a justice conferred on
men by God. Thus Chrysostom,(17) Augustine,(18) and most modern exegetes.(19)
What lends weight to the second interpretation is the fact that God's own
justice gets revealed precisely in His conferring justice on men, as Paul
himself suggests: "so that He Himself might be just and render just the man
who has faith in Jesus Christ" (Romans 3:26). By contrast, Luther's notion
that "the justice of God" here refers to His vindictive action against
sinners is totally unsupported either by the Fathers or by the modern scholars.

The thought of Romans 1:17 is picked up again in Romans 3:21-22: "Now
the justice of God, to which the Law and the prophets bear witness, has been
manifested apart from the Law, the very justice which, through faith in Jesus
Christ, comes to all those who believe, without distinction." Here there is
no doubt that God's justice is something which comes to men, is communicated to
men.

In this light, look again at a text we saw before: "(The Jews) not
knowing the justice of God and seeking to establish their own justice, did not
submit to God's justice" (Romans 10:3) We can now see that the contrast is
not between God's attribute and man's achievement, but rather between something
God communicates to man and something man tries to achieve on his own. Both
pertain to man, and so, they are rivals, Now, we can begin to understand this
"non-submission." It was not the attitude of the true heroes of the
Old Testament. Besides the example of Abraham, we have a whole catalogue of Jews
who lived "by faith" in Hebrews 11, a document which, if not by Paul
himself, was certainly written by someone intimately concurrent with his
thought. "There is not time for me to give an account of Gideon, Barak,
Samson, Jephthah, or of David, Samuel and the prophets. These men who through
faith conquered kingdoms, did what is right and earned the promises."
(Hebrews 11:32f) Now the key to these men, by virtue of which they are said to
have lived "by faith", is not that they did not do any works of the
Law! Obviously. Rather, the key is that they lived in total dependence upon
God's promises, in total openness to what God would yet reveal. That is why there
is no contradiction between their attitude and the surprising turn which
revelation took in Jesus Christ. But the other and later Jews had so reduced
faith to the keeping of the Law, that the Law could not be provisional; as a
result, their whole attitude toward God was not one of expectant faith but one
of satisfied accomplishment. So, when the justice that God had all along
intended to confer upon man was revealed in Jesus the Servant-Messiah, they did
not submit to it. Not so obtuse as Luther, they could see that this
"justice of God" was meant for them and so was a rival to the justice
they already thought they had. And not so obtuse as the Galatians, they could
see that if the Messiah's death had a point to it, then the Law could not
justify them.

Now, if what Paul means by <dikaiosune theou> is not something to
remain in God but something meant to be conferred on us, then we must reckon
with that mysterious possibility: a quality of man which is the property of God!
Does St. Paul say anything to indicate a knowledge of this possibility? Indeed
he does: "God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we in
him might become justice of God" (II Cor. 5:21). This verse is the pattern
on which Athanasius would learn to say, "God became man, so that man might
become divine." It is not a question of replacement but of participation,
and the participation is real in both directions. First in Jesus: just as really
as the Word took our humanity, just that really his humanity became God. And
then in us: just as really as Christ-God took our sins (so really that even the
Father forsook Him—Mark 15:34), just that really we receive God's justice. For
if we dare to believe that in the Incarnation our nature, without ceasing to be
a human nature, received God's subsistence, then we may easily believe that we,
in Christ, receive God's justice as our quality. In fact, St. Paul even has a
name for this quality. In the very next verse (II Cor. 6:1) he says: "As
God's co-workers, we beg you once again not to have received God's grace in
vain." What we should not "receive in vain" is exactly what Paul
has just said we have "become" in Christ. God's justice is His grace,
a gift <given> to men. That is why the justice of God is identically
"the justice which <comes from> God through faith" (Philippians
3:9).

What emerges from these texts, then, is the existence in man of a justice
conferred by God. But this justice is tied into faith, whether before Christ's
coming, as in the case of Abraham, or afterwards, as in our case. What we must
explore next is the nature of this tie-in between justice and faith.

St. Paul's most important text on faith is Romans 10:13-17: "Whoever
shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how shall they call
upon one in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in one of
whom they have never heard? And how shall they hear if no one preaches? And how
shall anyone preach unless he has been sent...But not everyone has obeyed (<hupekousan>)
the Gospel. As Isaiah said, 'Lord, who has believed our report?' So faith
depends upon preaching and preaching upon the word of Christ" We have here
an order of necessary conditions, which inverts to yield the following order of
precedence: (1) The word or teaching of Christ, i.e. the Gospel; (2) the mission
to preach given to the Apostles; (3) their preaching; (4) our hearing, and
finally (5) an act which may be described equally well as <faith>
(<pistis>) and as obedience (<hypakoe>).(20)

The point that faith is based on hearing is made also in Galatians 3:2 and 5:
"Did you receive the spirit on the basis of the works of the Law or on the
basis of the hearing of faith?" And the point that faith is receiving the
words of the Apostles in a spirit of obedience to God is found again in I
Thessalonians 2:13 "We thank God for the fact that, as soon as you received
through us the word of God which you heard from our mouth, you heard it as God's
word." This is why Paul twice speaks of "the obedience of faith"
(Romans 1:5 and 16:26, the genitive being appositional) and also why II Cor.
10:5 says that every thought (or every intellect) is to be brought into a
captivity which is "obedience of Christ."

These texts indicate that what St. Paul called "faith" certainly
included the scholastic sense of the term (assent or submission of the intellect
to the truths taught by Christ to His Apostles, and by them to us, on the
authority of God) but also included more. The reader should remember that the
scholastic definition of 'faith' was designed to do a technical job, namely, to
designate the common content of 'living faith' (<fides caritate formata>)
and 'dead faith' (<fides informis>). It does this job very well; the
common content is intellectual assent to the revealed message. But St. Paul's
term 'faith' was used by him to designate man's rightful response to Christ's
message. Now, where this message consists of truths of fact (e.g. "Before
Abraham was, I am"; "I and the Father are one," etc.)
intellectual assent is all there is to the rightful response; but where the
message contains imperatives ("Repent and be baptized"), consolations
("Fear not, I have overcome the world"), promises ("But I will
see you again, and your heart shall rejoice"), examples ("When you
pray, pray like this: Our Father...") etc., there the rightful response is
to do as one is commanded, take the consolation, trust the promise, heed the
example and so forth. Indeed, to believe in a command intellectually and then
not do it, to accept a consolation intellectually and then not feel it, to
acknowledge a promise and then not trust it—these are even unnatural
responses. "Dead faith" is an ugly thing—not just
"unformed" but deformed by sin and shot-through with the
self-contradiction which lies at the heart of every sin.

So, a rightful response to Christ's total message must not only include faith
in the narrow sense but must be what St. Paul calls "obedience of
faith," which is just what Catholic theology calls the acts of faith, hope
and love.(21)

We are now in a position to see the tie-in between faith and justice. Observe
first of all how St. Paul expresses the connection in prepositions. He speaks of
God's "justice which is <from> (<ek>) faith" (Romans 9:30;
10:6); he says we are "justified <from> faith" (Gal. 2:16;
3:24). So justice is distinct from faith; it proceeds from it. Justice has its
source and point of departure in faith. However, lest we should get the idea
that justice is a direct "output" of faith, or a natural derivative,
it is vital to see that a divine action intervenes between faith and justice:
"God justifies the Gentiles from faith" (Gal. 3:8,30; cf. Romans
3:24). This divine action is highlighted by Paul's other favorite preposition,
the instrumental <dia>, through. "God's justice is through
faith" (Romans 3:22; Phil. 3:9) "he justifies the gentiles through
faith" (Romans 3:30). So man gets justified, but God does the justifying,
and He does it by means of faith, using faith as an instrument. Elsewhere we
have it (Phil. 3:10) that "the justice from God is on the basis of faith
(<epi>)" and (Hebrews 11:7) "according to faith (<kata>)

These prepositions instruct us on how to take Paul's meaning when he
dispenses with prepositions in favor of a simple instrumental dative: "For
we think that man is justified by faith" (Romans 3:28); "through Him
(Christ) we have access by faith" (Romans 5:1). The meaning is the same as
before. Faith remains God's instrument in justifying, and not (as Luther
supposed) man's instrument in getting justified.

But how does God use this instrument? We have an indication from Romans 4:3f.
"Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him (<elogisthe>) for
justice." In the Hebrew of Genesis 15:6, the verb is active: "God
counted it as justice." So the mystery is being described as an accounting
procedure. God credits <pistis> to Abraham's account as having the value
of <dikaiosune.> Now the question is what kind of accounting this is.
Luther supposed that God took a thing of no real value (our faith) and made it
stand for something of value. God doctored the Book of Life! Such an idea has no
foundation in the text. The key verb here (<logizomai>) is used throughout
the Septuagint (Psalm 106:31; Isa. 40:17), and even in Koine Greek, and in the
New Testament (Acts 19:17), and even in St. Paul's epistle to the Romans (2:26;
9:8), to mean an honest reckoning, based on a real equivalence of value between
the two things. Nowhere does the crediting presuppose a disproportion between
the thing furnished (e.g. faith) and the value put on it (e.g. justice). No,
indeed; what Abraham's faith is said to count for in Gen. 15:6 is the very thing
which the keeping of the Law is said to count for in Deuteronomy 6:25 and 24:13.
Living faith is worth righteousness. Yes, but not in the way that works are
worth it. Hear how Paul continues the passage which he started about Abraham
(Romans 4:4f): "To the one who works, his wages are not credited to him
according to grace but according to what is owed. But to the one who does not
work but believes in Him who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited to him
for righteousness. " So, if faith is really worth righteousness, it is not
worth it in the way that works are. The latter have their value in the order of
strict justice, whereas faith has its value in the order of grace (<kata
charin>).

Does it follow, then, that the order of grace is arbitrary, unreal, an order
in which the worthless is accorded fictitious worth? Not at all! We have seen
what living faith really is. It is that rightful response to the Gospel, whereby
man assents to the truths, heeds the commands, feels the consolations, trusts
the promises—in short, it is that total attitude toward God <from> which
(as from a source) or through which (as by a means) God can draw forth every
good work with the further help of His actual graces. Between such faith as a
basis and the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" as an
apex, there is a real continuity and proportion. <That> is why God can use
faith to justify us, and why He can, without dishonesty, credit that faith to
our account as the root and foundation of all justice.

For as St. Paul himself says, in a verse which ought to have stopped the
mouth of Luther forever, "We are God's handiwork, having been created in
Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk
in them" (Ephesians 2:10). Our new creaturehood in Christ Jesus is our
reception, through grace, of the "obedience of faith." Through that
faith, as through an instrument, God has refashioned us, making us now prompt to
obey. Our new estate is thus ordered to good works as to its intrinsic and
God-intended finality. With what joy, therefore, do we walk in them, we who
believe! And woe to us if we do not walk in them, for then we betray our faith
and frustrate God's handiwork.

So we have, and are intended to have, works. Does it follow that we may
boast? Not at all! For our works, unlike the works attempted by the Jew under
the Law, are not <from> us but <from> God. Rooted in God's gift,
brought forth by living faith, God's instrument in us, these works are
grace-works. They are our justice <through> faith, and therefore they are
justice in the order of grace (<kata charin>), not in the order of
self-achievement where boasting arises.

Living faith: our quality but God's instrument; good works: out deeds but
God's handiwork; our deeds as men living in Christ, not the motions of
"graced" zombies still dead in sin—these are the possibilities
overlooked by Luther and Calvin but preached by Paul and defined by Trent.

Notes

1 Council of Trent, Canons on Justification, especially canon 24; Denzinger-Schoenmetzer
# 1574. The Church considers herself bound to this position by James 2:14-26.

2 The teaching of the Second Council of Orange is given in Denzinger ##
374ff. and that of Trent in #1553. To say that, prior to a person's conversion
(or baptism), his or her "good deeds" may merit God's grace is
Pelagianism or worse; even to say that man has the initiative in this
preparatory stage, or that his first response of faith is his own free motion,
his own step <towards> the grace of God and not already an effect of the
grace of God, is a heresy (Semi-Pelagianism).

12 When discussing this passage with a Protestant, most especially a
Protestant male, one must keep in mind that one is talking to a person who went
through the travails of adolescence without the help of the Sacraments. To such
a person, it seems the most obvious thing in the world (too obvious, indeed, to
be mentioned that what St. Paul is talking about is erection, sexual lust, and
other aspects of arousal. This idea is abetted by the King James Version, which
uses 'lust' and 'concupiscence' throughout this passage, where I have used
'covetousness'—words which had a broader meaning in the 17th Century, of
course, than they have today. The fact of the matter is that Paul is not
speaking exclusively nor even primarily of sexual matter. By the "law in
our members" he means the whole phenomenon of over-inclination towards
visible, tangible, worldly goods and values—an overinclination to which man's
bodily nature (<sarkinos>) makes him naturally liable, and to which Adam's
fall has made man not only liable but actually subject (<sarkikos>). Thus
man's sinfulness, for Paul is a broad-based as man's very secularity. In
<that> light, it is intelligible why even the very first and most basic
commandment of the Law, the commandment to have God alone as one's ultimate
concern, should prove to be so difficult, cross-grained, and frustrating to us.

Catholic children, thanks to the early and regular practice of Confession,
tend to grow up with a better grasp of this broad character of "sin."
But in Protestant countries, few factors have been more ruinous to Christianity
than the tendency to almost identify sin with sex and thereby to shift the
center of "sin" away from deliberate acts and towards the
uncontrollable motions of the "id" or the genitals.

19. Cf. Sanday-Headlam, <Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans> (IGC)
p. 25.

20 For the same indifference between 'faith' and 'obedience', compare Rom.
10:16 with II Thess. 3:2.

21 See how the acts called hope and love are founded on intellectual assent
(otherwise I wouldn't even acknowledge the command or the promise, etc.) but add
to it in such a way that the assent <becomes> the loving assent of the
whole man. This is why Trent, using 'faith' in the narrow sense, was right to
say <both> that faith is the root and foundation of all justification
<and> that faith is made living by hope and love.